In 1895, the world's first movie was born, and mankind's artistic creation and cultural ideals entered a new era of history. Chinese film was born in 1905, accompanied by the process of world cinema and the revival of the Chinese nation. With its distinctive national personality and aesthetic characteristics, it has made brilliant achievements, forged a historical monument, and made unique artistic contributions to the world cinema.
Folk Film Period
This phase lasted from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, represented by Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth, Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, and Farewell My Concubine and Alive. Chinese movies took the first step towards the world and began to be noticed internationally, achieving a series of awards such as the Golden Bear, the Golden Lion, the Palme d'Or, and Venice.
Chinese films of this period were set in feudal families and showed tragic stories of sin and punishment during the feudal and authoritarian period of China; these subjects, although to a certain extent triggered misunderstandings about China among foreign people, made more people interested in China, and made the fifth generation of Chinese filmmakers, such as Gong Li, Ge You and Zhang Yimou, grow up to be world filmmakers.
Independent Film Period
The mid-1990s to the late 1990s was the lowest period of the modern Chinese film industry, partly due to the overly strict censorship of the film industry by the Chinese government, and partly due to the onslaught of television culture. Against this difficult historical background, the 6th generation of Chinese filmmakers produced a certain amount of works from the perspective of marginal cultural gestures, the lives of the lower class, and the fusion of Chinese and Western cultures, and achieved a certain level of success in major film festivals around the world. For example, "Bathing" and "Messy Hair".
The Period of Transnational Cinema
Since China's accession to the WTO in 2001, China's movie industry has entered a new stage of rapid development. The great progress of Chinese movies has brought them back to people's daily life. Last year alone, the overseas box office revenue of Chinese movies reached 1.9 billion, more than 2/3 of the domestic box office revenue (2.8 billion.) Chinese movies with classical themes, righteousness and chivalry motifs, stories of heterosexual love, and martial arts sequences have won wide acclaim in the international market. Heroes, No Thieves Under Heaven, Night Banquet, and The City is Full of Gold are outstanding representatives of this period. At the same time, through the huge advertising vehicle of movies, Chinese culture became more and more known overseas.
Expanded Information:
From 1896 to the 1920s, foreigners monopolized China's film market, but they could not stop the beginning of China's film industry. 1903, the German student Lin Zhusan returned to China with a film and a projector, and rented the Tianle Tea Garden in Beijing's Qianmen Polishing Factory to show films. In 1905, Ren Qingtai of the Fengtai Photo Studio in Beijing filmed part of the Peking Opera "Dingjunshan" starring Tan Xinpei, a veteran of the Peking Opera, to celebrate his birthday.
From the very beginning, Chinese cinema has combined with the traditional Chinese arts of opera and rap to develop a unique film genre. But Fengtai Photo Studio, the earliest attempt to make this type of movie, was only a small business, not a film organization.
It was not until the emergence of the "Movie Department" of the Commercial Press that the Chinese film industry really began. During this period, in addition to the "Commercial", the successive emergence of film production organizations also include the U.S. investment "Asia Film Company", "phantom fairy", "China", "Shanghai", "New Asia", etc. Since most of their members came from the theater stage, most of the themes and contents of the films at that time originated from Chinese opera and civilized theater. In addition, they also began to shoot short and feature-length films, making the most preliminary exploration and experimentation of the art of cinema.
Chinese cinema was born in 1905, and has gone through various stages of history, including the semi-feudal and semi-colonial period, the revolutionary war period, the construction of new China, the Cultural Revolution, the reform and opening-up period, and the new period of building a moderately prosperous society; and it has gone through the process of technological change, from silent to sound, from black-and-white to color, from analog to digital, and from traditional to modern.
At different stages of development, Chinese films have left behind outstanding masterpieces: during the pioneering period in the 1920s, there were progressive films such as Orphans Saving Ancestors, which focused on social transformation; during the period of resistance to the Japanese invasion and salvation, there were films such as The Wild Streams and Children of China, which inspired morale and promoted patriotism; and after the War of Resistance, films such as 8,000 Miles of Roads, the Clouds, and the Moon and A River Flowing East, which profoundly revealed the contradictions and the nature of society, forming a trend of realist creation.
She is a member of the Chinese Academy of Arts and Letters, the Chinese Academy of Arts and Letters.
She said that during the 17 years after the founding of New China in 1949, a large number of excellent works combining realism and romanticism, such as "The White-haired Girl", "Blessing" and "The Lin Family Shop", emerged, and shaped a large number of screen images with a strong national style, forming the first climax of the development of the new Chinese cinema; after the decade-long Cultural Revolution, Chinese cinema came out of the doldrums and made a large number of films such as "Little Flower" and "Man in the Middle Age", and so on. A Man in His Middle Years" and a large number of excellent films reflecting the practice of reform and criticizing the social ills of the time. Especially at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the second climax was formed by major revolutionary and historical films such as Founding Ceremony and The Battle of Armageddon, as well as realistic films such as Jiao Yulu and Phoenix Qin.
Entering the 1990s, Zhao Shi said, Chinese films have implemented major measures such as film and television merger reform, film excellence project, rural film projection project, film shareholding system, syndication reform and other major measures, and there have been brand-new breakthroughs and enhancements in both artistic quality and form. In addition to such works as Kong Fan Sen, The Day I Left Lei Feng, Xi Lian, and That Mountain, That Man, That Dog, new styles of New Year's Eve and comedy films such as See No Evil emerged, and a large number of new forces emerged. Entering the new century, Chinese movies have formed a new pattern of coordinated development of state-owned, collective and private ownership, and the development of movies has embarked on a virtuous circle.
"Deng Xiaoping", "The Cocoanuts", "Once Upon a Time in Taiwan" and other masterpieces have achieved a double harvest of social and economic benefits, and domestic blockbusters such as "Heroes" and "Myths" **** the same dominant position in China's market, and created a box office miracle of Chinese films in the world of cinema. More than 30 Chinese films have won awards at more than 40 international film festivals, marking the arrival of the third development climax.
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